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Event Detail

Tuesday, April 16, 2013

University Endowments and Universal Owners: The Sustainability Challenge

This session puts the controversies of some university endowments
into the larger context of existing and emerging U.S. and global
corporate governance standards. These standards, while in flux and
varying somewhat from country to country, include transparency,
accountability and accounting not only for financial performance,
but also for the not as yet fully financial factors. These factors
are often referred to as ESG (environmental, social and
governance), and increasingly a focus on financial and economic
sustainability. The idea of the universal owner as a large
institution with a diversified portfolio which owns a cross section
of assets classes that are more or less representative of the
economy, and thereby internalized some proportion of externalities
generated by the assets it owns, making it a reasonably proxy for
the 'public interest'. http://hausercenter.harvard.edu/?p=2222